The Provincial Court has sentenced the former mayor of Jacarilla, José Manuel Gálvez Ortuño (Popular Party), to eight months in prison and four years of disqualification from public office for the crimes of fraud against the Administration.
The sentence considers it proven that Gálvez modified the location of a sewage treatment plant in 2006 to benefit a builder, disregarding administrative procedures. The sentence substantially reduces the one requested by the Public Prosecutor’s Office, which was asking for eight years in prison for an addition crime of passive bribery, of which the former mayor of this small town of just over two thousand inhabitants has been acquitted.
The court also sentenced the builders Joaquín Grau Roch (Agrícola del Segura) and Cristina Bernabé and Victoriano Bernabé, from the company Benaguas 2000 SL to four months in prison.
The complaint was filed with the Public Prosecutor’s Office in March 2015 by the former mayor, Pilar Díez (PSOE) but it was only this year that it came to trial
The former mayor, who served between 1999 and 2011, will also have to pay 27,000 euros in civil liability to the residents affected by his actions, along with the others convicted.
The treatment plant, which was finally built in 2011 but never put into operation, was designed to solve the wastewater problem of a small residential area of Vistabella as part of a redevelopment plan awarded to Benaguas 2000 by the Jacarilla Council.
The wastewater from the Vistabella residential complex – some 250 houses – continues to be dumped into an agricultural pond without being treated.
